This doctoral research project addresses the significant lacunae in the inadequate inclusive understanding of Ghana’s gold mining history over the late colonial and early post-colonial period that encompass multiple socio-political actors in the industry’s encounters with state and society. The thesis examines the overarching contestations among multiple social and political actors over access to the potential benefits to be derived from mineral extraction within this changing socio-political landscape. It utilises a wide range of archival materials encompassing colonial and post-colonial state and mining companies’ records, combined with in-depth oral histories with diverse mining communities’ actors with lived experiences of these settings, dating to the mid-to-late twentieth century.
While the study period saw the dominance of industrialised gold mining with accompanied political-economic policies and socio-cultural norms that prevented artisanal mining operations in the study communities, access to the resultant industrially generated mineral wealth took multiple and diverse forms. It transcended the often-explored state-company-worker relations within the formal masculinised industrial extractive sector, and is here analysed in relation to a pluralist understanding of these mining communities. The thesis demonstrates the need to understand Ghana’s gold mining history during this period in an inclusive and nuanced way, emphasising the agency of diverse social and political actors ranging from elite political and economic actors from the colonial metropole to the national, and then to local subaltern members of mining communities, within a single analytical framework. Against the background that historical reality often defies the logic of rigid periodisation, the thesis provides an inclusive understanding of how these diverse actors navigated change and contested—albeit commonly in unequal ways—access to the benefits generated by mineral resources based on ideas that were both historically continuous and radically transforming during the period under analysis
